The Girl in the Glass (33 page)

A wave of disappointment crept over me.

My great-great-grandfather had painted her far differently. He had endowed his Andromeda with such elegance and beauty that it was easy to believe Perseus would battle a monster no one else had been able to kill—just to rescue her. And my great-great-grandfather’s perspective had placed the statue not yards away in a watered prison, but close to the form of my young grandmother who held her own hand toward Andromeda’s in a mirrored pose.

He had reimagined Andromeda as beautiful and still hopeful. I turned toward Sofia.

“She’s not how I pictured her.” Disappointment tugged heavily at my words. “She looks so beaten down.”

Sofia nodded sympathetically. “The elements are hard on outdoor statuary. There are other statues of Andromeda. And paintings too. I can show you those.”

“But this is the one that mattered to me.” I raised my camera, but then lowered it. I suddenly didn’t want a picture of the way the statue really looked. I did not want to remember her this way, my beloved, beckoning Andromeda. As if in sympathy for me, the sun edged behind a lingering cloud. I turned away from the statue. “I like the one I see in my memory so much better.”

“Then that’s the one you hang on to, Marguerite. That’s the one you keep.”

We turned around and began to walk out of the cypress alley back toward the palace. Sofia shared with me the storied details of the Pitti Palace and the Medicis who had lived there, a kind distraction from the disappointment still swirling inside me.

Clouds were again gathering overhead, and a breeze began to pick up. We were still a few minutes’ walk from the palace’s front doors.

We quickened our steps.

Finally the palace was in front of us, but it looked plain and homely to me, void of outside decoration, just cube after cube of enormous wheat-colored stone, three stories high.

As we prepared to go in, Sofia told me there was much to see inside, especially in the more than twenty-eight rooms in the Palatine Gallery. But she told me there was a painting she wanted to show me first that hung in the corner between one salon and another.

The opulence inside was staggering, and I kept my eyes trained ahead as we made our way to the left wing of the first floor. We were headed for the farthest corner, bypassing salon after salon of canvas-filled rooms.

We arrived at an alcove of sorts where several statues dominated the visual landscape. At the corner where two walls came together, three paintings hung in a seemingly forgotten place.

The one in the middle, not much bigger than the spread of my outstretched arms, drew me in. I knew in an instant the young girl who stared back at me from within the paint strokes was Nora Orsini.

The girl looked to be twelve or thirteen. Her brown hair was pulled away from her face, revealing deep brown eyes that bore into mine. Her caramel-hued dress was cut tight across her bodice, sucking her into it, it seemed. A pearl necklace circled her neck. Her closed mouth was slightly upturned in the makings of a subtle smile. She held two paintbrushes in her hand.

“Nora painted?”

Sofia smiled. “She did. This was her self-portrait. It’s not signed. No one else attributes it to her. But I know she painted it. She whispers that she did. It’s the only painting of hers there is.”

“Why is it here in the corner like this?”

“Everyone thinks it was painted by a nameless art student in the late fifteen hundreds. It is still a valuable painting based on its age, but the curators here don’t know who painted it. How could they know? She didn’t sign it.”

Up to that moment, every work of art I had seen in Florence had been created by a man. I uttered something of this notion as I stood there staring at Nora’s image.

“All the great Renaissance painters were men,” Sofia said, “but that does not mean that Renaissance women could not paint or didn’t have the aptitude for it. Some had it, but they were not encouraged to pursue it as anything but parlor entertainments. They appreciated beauty in the arts just as much as the men did. They knew the arts’ ability to redeem, just like the men did. They probably needed that loveliness more than the men did.”

Sofia took a step toward the painting so that her body touched the velvet rope that kept spectators at a safe distance. She was as close to the painting as she could legally get.

“If you can imagine your life is peaceful and good, that your father and mother care for each other, and you are as sure of their affection for each other as their unchanging love for you, then you can paint yourself like this. You can paint what you believe. If you can imagine it, you can paint it.”

I started to ask her what she meant, but before I could, she continued.

“And if you could escape to that painted place in your dreams, the time when life had been wonderful, because the truth is, your father murdered your mother and did not care if he ever saw you again, then of course you would.”

“I guess you would.”

“The first time I saw this painting, I was unable to walk away from it; it pulled me so. I asked my papa why. He said he wanted me to discover for myself why Nora Orsini’s portrait tugged at me. Papa told me to close my eyes and listen; just like I had you close yours in the chapel. To shut everything else out and listen, inviting her, by my silence, to speak. You see, Marguerite? She painted herself happy. She created a place in her mind where she could have her wonderful years. No one could take them from her.”

At that moment I had a sudden influx of memories of my parents and me when we were still whole; those magical years before the divorce, before my perception of family had been swept away from me. Before the miscarriage, before my dad met Allison, there had been wonderful years. I was a child; I saw the wonderful, more than the terrible. A child’s vision is geared to see the wonderful.

My father had confessed to me on Poppy-Seed Day that he felt like he had failed me as a father in my growing-up years, but the truth was, I never felt he had. Even after the divorce, I wanted him to be my Perseus. What I needed now was a new kind of rescuer. I wasn’t a little girl anymore. Little girls in distress are rescued by their fathers. Grown girls in distress want to be rescued by someone else.

I wanted a prince to show up, not my dad.

I pulled out my camera, made sure the flash was off, and took a picture of the canvas in front of us. This would be the picture I took home from today. Not a shot of a decaying statue.

Nora Orsini wanted to imagine that a different life could be hers.

So she did.

She looked at herself in a mirror and painted the girl she wanted to see.

I remember lying in my bed in the suffocating heat and calling for my mother. Nurse told me she couldn’t come; she was in heaven with the angels. I told Nurse to go fetch her for me.

And Nurse said heaven is not a place with a door.

“I want her,” I said.

“She is with the angels,” said Nurse.

For a while I hated every angel in every painting and statue and tapestry, for they had my mother and were keeping her from me. I wouldn’t look at them, and I said terrible things under my breath when I passed them.

And then I began to fear them. Would they hurt my mother because I hated them? I wasn’t sure. After a while my hatred was exhausting; it sapped me of breath and strength and sleep.

In my weariness I began to be drawn to the angels for solace. They had my mother. If I could be close to them, I could be close to her.

And then I began to cherish them. I wandered the halls and gazed up at them in their paintings and in stone, in reverent devotion like a lovesick maiden.

And then I began to listen to them.

26

Sofia was up before me the next morning, tapping away at her laptop. Later we would see the Medici Chapels and the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, but we had planned a quiet morning working on Sofia’s book before stepping out. I had her other finished chapters to read and send to Beatriz, and she wanted to spend the morning hours writing.

I knew at some point that day, Renata would be talking to Emilio. Emilio had not called Sofia to find out what the heck was going on; she would have said something if he had. As I sat reading her chapter on Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici—finally a Medici with merit—I decided to pave the way for a later conversation about Emilio. I was pretty sure there would be one. She was going to have to know at some point that we had contacted him, especially if he was the one to help us authenticate Sofia’s ancestry.

When she got up from her laptop to refill her coffee cup, I asked her as casually as I could if she had any other family on her father’s side besides Emilio. Cousins, perhaps?

“No. Emilio never married.” She set the carafe back in the coffee maker.

I hurriedly dashed out another question. “Does Emilio ever come to Florence?”

She nodded slowly. “Sometimes. He prefers Rome.”

“But I suppose with the building to co-manage, he has to come sometimes.”

A tiny frown crossed her face. She was trying to figure out where I was
going with this conversation. “I already told you he won’t help me with this.” She nodded toward the pages I was reading.

“What if we just ask him?” I kept my tone light and casual.

She shook her head. “I know you mean well, Meg. But I do not trust Emilio. My father does not trust him. I know they are brothers and he should not feel that way. But he does. Emilio only cares about money. He would love to sell this building right out from under my father and me. Nothing matters to him but getting what he wants. I do not trust him.”

Cold apprehension poked at me. I didn’t know what to say next, and since I said nothing, Sofia walked back to her laptop and sat down.

I waited a few minutes and then announced I was going to take a little walk to stretch my legs and that I wouldn’t be long.

I sauntered out of the flat and then dashed across the landing to Renata and Lorenzo’s door. I had to tell her we needed to nix the call with Emilio for now. I would find some other way to get what we needed.

But there was no answer at the door. I didn’t have Renata’s cell phone number, but I knew I had Lorenzo’s. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and texted him to tell Renata to text me as soon as possible. It was urgent.

I went downstairs and then out the front door to take the walk I said I was going to take, holding my cell phone in my hand and waiting to hear back. After ten minutes Lorenzo texted me that he had left a message for Renata to call him. She was in a meeting with the editors of the magazine she often writes for. He also asked what had happened.

“We need to drop the call to Emilio today,” I texted.

A few minutes later, he texted me back.

“She already talked to him.”

My heart sank.

“What did he say?”

“I left before she hung up. On a shoot.”

My mind began to race with how I would be able to convince Sofia that we had contacted Emilio before she told me she didn’t trust him. It was too late to think we wouldn’t have that conversation. My phone vibrated in my hand. Lorenzo had sent me another text.

“She just texted me.”

And then another text.

“Come over tonight after 9:30.”

“Good news or bad news?” I texted.

It was several minutes before he texted me back.

“Neither.”

How could it be neither? If Emilio could help us and would help us, that was good news. If he wouldn’t or couldn’t, that was bad.

How could black-and-white Renata say it was neither?

I walked slowly back to the flat, at a snail’s pace, to convince myself “neither” surely had to be more good than bad.